In preventive maintenance and mission planning, it is important to determine the likelihood of failures in a monitored system as symptoms (i.e., evidence) are observed. Since many failures frequently have overlapping evidence, it is often the case that ambiguity in fault reasoning will exist when trying to find the root cause failure. For example, the ambiguity can indicate that two system components have failed but there is no way to determine if one or the other or both are the true cause of a fault without the use of complex, and thus expensive, software.
Accordingly, it is desirable to reduce fault detection ambiguity by providing new and additional evidence to disambiguate two or more failure modes. In addition, it is desirable to provide a means for establishing such evidence. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.